It is stated above that the H. P. B. manuscript varied at times, and that there were several variants of the one prevailing script ; also that each change in the writing was accompanied by a marked alteration in the manner, motions, expression, and literary capacity of H. P. B. When she was left to her own devices, it was often not difficult to know it, for then the untrained literary apprentice became manifest and the cutting and pasting began ; then the copy that was turned over to me for revision was terribly faulty, and after having been converted into a great smudge of inter-lineations, erasures, orthographic corrections and substitutions, would end in being dictated by me to her to re-write (Cf. Theory 7). Now often things were, after a while, said to me that would be more than hints that other intelligences than H. P. B.'s were at times using her body as a writing machine : it was never expressly said, for example, " I am so and so," or " Now this is A or B." It did not need that after we " twins " had been working together long enough for me to become familiar with her every peculiarity of speech, moods, and impulses. The change was as plain as day, and by and by after she had been out of the room and returned, a brief study of her features and actions enabled me to say to myself, " This is J or , or, " and presently my suspicion would be confirmed by what happened. One of these Alter Egos of hers, one whom I have since personally met, wears a full beard and long moustache that are twisted, Rajput fashion, into his side whiskers. He has the habit of constantly pulling at his moustache when deeply pondering : he does it mechanically and unconsciously. Well, there were times when H. P. B.'s personality had melted away and she was " Somebody else," when I would sit and watch her hand as if pulling at and twisting a moustache that certainly was not growing visibly on H. P. B.'s upper lip, and the far-away look would be in the eyes, until presently resuming attention of passing things, the moustached Somebody would look up, catch me watching him, hastily remove the hand from the face, and go on with the work of writing. Then there was another Somebody, who disliked English so much that he never willingly talked with me in anything but French : he had a fine artistic talent and a passionate fondness for mechanical invention. Another one would now and then sit there, scrawling something with a pencil and reeling off for me dozens of poetical stanzas which embodied, now sublime, now humorous ideas.

So each of the several Somebodies had his peculiarities distinctly marked, as recognisable as those of any of our ordinary acquaintances or friends. One was jovial, fond of good stories and witty to a degree ; another, all, reserve, and erudition. One would be calm, patient, and benevolently helpful, another testy and sometimes exasperating. One Somebody would always be willing to emphasise his philosophical or scientific explanations of the subjects I was to write upon, by doing phenomena for my edification, while to another Somebody I dared not even mention them. I got an awful rebuke one evening. I had brought home a while before two nice, soft pencils, just the thing for our desk work, and had given one to H. P. B. and kept one my self. She had the very bad habit of borrowing pen knives, pencils, rubber, and other articles of stationery and forgetting to return them : once put into her drawer or writing-desk, there they would stay, no matter how much of a protest you might make over it. On this particular evening, the artistic Somebody was sketching a navvv's face on a sheet of common paper and chatting with me about something, when he asked me to lend him another pencil. The thought flashed into my mind, " If I once lend this nice pencil it will go into her drawer and I shall have none for my own use." I did not say this, I only thought it, but the Somebody gave me a mildly sarcastic look, reached out to the pen-tray between us, laid his pencil in it, handled it with his fingers of that hand for a moment, and lo ! a dozen pencils of the identical make and quality ! He said not a word, did not even give me a look, but the blood rushed to my temples and I felt more humble than I ever did in my life. All the same, I scarcely think I deserved the rebuke, considering what a stationery-annexer H. P. B. was !

Now when either of these Somebodies was " on guard," as I used to term it, the H. P. B. manuscript would present the identical peculiarities that it had on the last occasion when he had taken his turn at the literary work. He would, by preference, write about the class of subjects that were to his taste, and instead of H. P. B. playing the part of an amanuensis, she would then have become for the time being that other person (Cf. Theory 3). If you had given me in those days any page of Isis manuscript, I could almost certainly have told you by which Somebody it had been written. Where, then, was H. P. B.'s self at those times of replacement ? Ah, that is the question ; and that is one of the mysteries which are not given to the first comer.* As I understood it, she herself had loaned her body as one might one's type-writer, and had gone off on other occult business that she could transact in her astral body ; a certain group of Adepts occupying and manoeuvring the body by turns. When they knew that I could distinguish between them, so as to even have invented a name for each by which H. P. B. and I might designate them in our conversation in their absence, they would frequently give me a grave bow or a friendly farewell nod when about to leave the room and give place to the next relief

* Nearly two years after the above was published H. P. B. explained to her relatives (cf. Part articles above cited) the secret ; she was not in her body, but seemingly near it, with full consciousness watching its manipulation by third parties.  

guard. And they would sometimes talk to me of each other as friends do about absent third parties, by which means I came to know bits of their several personal histories ; and would also speak about the absent H. P. B., distinguishing her from the physical body they had borrowed from her. One Mahatma, writing me about some occult business, speaks of it — the H. P. B. body — as " the old appearance " ; again, in 1876, he writes about " it and the Brother inside it " ; another Master asks me — A fr\-'fi\( of a terrific fit of anger to which I had (unintentionally) provoked H. P. B. — " Do you want to kill the body ? "' ; and the same one, in a note of 1S75, speaks of "those who represent us in the s/u/.'" — the underscoring of the word being his. Can any one understand my feelings upon discovering on a certain evening that I had unsuspiciously greeted the staid philosopher described in the next few sentences of the main text, with an hilarious levity that quite upset his usual calm ? Fancving that I was addressing only my "chum " H. P. B., I said : "Well, Old Horse, let us get to work ! " The next minute I was blushing for shame, for the blended expression of surprise and startled dignity that came into the face, showed me with whom I had to deal. It was as bad a cavalery as that committed by good old Peter Cooper at the New York Academy Ball to the Heir Apparent, when he slapped him on the shoulder and said : "Well, Wales, what do you think of this? " This was the one of them for whom I had the most filial reverence. It was not alone for his profound learning, lofty character and dignified demeanour, but also for his really paternal kindness and patience. It seemed as if he alone had read to the bottom of my heart, and wished to bring out every little spiritual germ that lay there as a latent potentiality. He was — I was told — a South Indian personage of long spiritual experience, a Teacher of Teachers ; still living among men ostensibly as a landed proprietor, yet known for what he was by nobody around him. Oh, the evenings of high thinking I passed with him ; how shall I ever compare with them any other experiences of my life ! Most vividly of all I remember one evening when, by half hints more than anything else, he awakened my intuition so that it grasped the theory of the relationship of cosmic cycles with fixed points in stellar constellations, the attractive centre shifting from point to point in an orderly sequence. Recall your sensations the first time you ever looked through a large telescope at the starry heavens — the awe, the wonder, the instant mental expansion experienced in looking from the familiar and, by comparison, commonplace Earth to the measureless depths of space and the countless starry worlds that bestrew the azure infinity. That was a faint approach to my feeling at the moment when that majestic concept of cosmic order rushed into my consciousness ; so over powering was it, I actually gasped for breath. If there had previously been the least lingering hereditary leaning towards the geocentric theory, upon which men have built their paltry theologies, it was then swept away like a dried leaf before the hurricane. I was borne into a higher pline of thought. I was a free man.

It was this Mister who dictated to H. P. B. the Replies to an English F. T. S. or questions suggested by a reading of " Esoteric Buddhism.' which was published in the Theosophical of September, October,and November, 1SS3. It was at Ooiacamtmd. at the house of Maj.-Gen. iMorgau. when, shivering withtJie cold, and her lower limbs swaddled i:i rugs, she sat vrriiir.g them. One morning I was in her room reading a book, when she turned her head and said : " I '11 be hanged if I ever heard of the I.rphv giants. Did you ever read of such a tribe. Olcott ? ' I said I did not. why did she ask ? " Well,' she replied, " the old gentleman tells me to write it down, but I 'm afraid there is some mistake : what do you say ? " I answered that if the Master in question gave her the name, she should write it without fear as he was always right. And she did. This is an example of multitude nous cases where she wrote from dictation things quite outside her personal knowledge. She never studied Hindi nor normally, could she speak or write it ; yet I have a Hindi note in Devanagari characters that I saw her write and hand to Swami Dayanand Saraswati at the Vizianagram garden-house at Benares, where we were quests in iSSo. The Swami read it. wrote and signed his answer on the same sheet, and H. P. B. left it on the table, from which I took it.

But I wish to say again, as distinctly as possible, that, not even from the wisest and noblest of these H. P. B.   Somebodies did I ever get the least encouragement to either regard them as infallible, omniscient, or omnipotent. There was never the least show of a wish on their part that I should worship them, mention them with bated breath, or regard as inspired what they either wrote with H. P. B.'s body, or dictated to her as their amanuensis. I was made simply to look upon them as men, my fellow-mortals ; wiser, truly, infinitely more advanced than I, but only because of their having proceeded me in the normal path of human evolution. Slavishness and indiscriminate adulation they loathed, telling me that they were usually but the cloaks to selfishness, conceit, and moral limpness. Their candid opinions were frequently vouchsafed to me after the departure of some of these flattering visitors, and it would have sent any of my readers into a fit of laughter if they had been there one evening after a gushing lady had bade us good-night. Before leaving she petted H. P. B., sat on the arm of her chair, patted her hand and kissed her on the cheek ; I standing near by and seeing the blank despair depicted in the (male) Somebody's face. I conducted the lady to the door, returned to the room, and almost exploded with merriment when the ascetic Somebody — a sexless sadhoo if there ever was one — turned his mournful eyes at me and in an accent of indescribable melancholy said, " She kissed me ! " It was too much ; I had to sit down.  

I have remarked above that the dictation and literary collaboration between the old Platonist and H. P. B.   was identical with that between her and the actual Adepts : and that, as he delighted in one branch of wort, so each of the others had their individual preferences. But there was the difference that while they at times would dictate to her and at others occupy her body and write through it as if it were their own (just as the spirit of Mar\ Roff utilised the body of Lurancy Vennum and felt it as natural as if she had been born in it), the Platonist never obsessed her : he only used her as his amanuensis. Then, again, I have spoken of the part of the Isis writing that was done by H. P. B. in pi\->fria />£-'-.v";J. which was inferior to that done for her by the Somebodies. This is perfectly comprehensible, for how could H. P. B., who had had no previous knowledge of this sort, write correctly about the multifarious subjects treated in her book ? In her (seemingly") normal state, she would read a book, mark the portions that struck her, write about them, make mistakes, correct them, discuss them with me, set me to writing, help my intuitions, get friends to supply materials, and go on thus as best she might, so long as there were none of the teachers within call of her psychic appeals. And they were not with us always, by any means. She did a vast deal of splendid writing, for she was endowed with marvellous natural literary" capacity ; she was never dull or uninteresting, and, as I have elsewhere noted, she was equally brilliant in three languages when the full power was upon her. She writes her Aunt that when her Master was busy elsewhere he left his substitute with her, and then it was her " Luminous Self," her Augoeides, which thought and wrote for her (Cf. Theory 2). About this, I cannot venture an opinion, for I never observed her in this state : I only knew her in three capacities, viz., her proper H. P. B. self ; with her body possessed or over shadowed by the Masters ; and as an amanuensis taking down from dictation. It may be that her Augoeides, taking possession of her physical brain, gave me the impression that it was one of the Masters that was at work : I cannot say. But what she omits telling her Aunt is that there were many, many times, when she was neither possessed, controlled nor dictated to by any superior in telligence, but was simply and palpably H. P. B., our familiar and beloved friend, latterly our teacher ; who was trying as well as she could to carry out the object of her literary mission. Yet, despite the mixed agencies at work in producing Isis, there is an expression of individuality running throughout it and her other works — something peculiar to herself. Epes Sargent and other American literary expressed to me their wonder at the grasp she showed of our language, and one gentleman went to the length of publishing the opinion that we had no living author who could excel her in writing English.

This, of course, is vague exaggeration, but happily her style has been made the subject of a close comparison with those of others by a philologist of scientific training. In his work on the Origin, Progress, and Destiny of the English Language and Literature, the learned author. Dr. John A. Weisse, publishes a number of analytical tables which show the sources of the words used by English writers of renown. In the following excerpts will be seen the derivations of the English of Isis Unveiled in comparison with those of the words employed by some other authors. Dr. Weisse says the book is " a thesaurus of new phases and facts, so sprightfully related that even the uninitiated may read them with interest." Following is the analysis : Which Author and Work Analysed. Greco Latin Words. Gotho German ic Words 54 46 31 68 51 47 47 51 30 68 58 41 53 46 53 46 46 51 36 63 Celtic Words. Semitic Words.

Robert Burton, A.D. 1621 Anatomy of MelaTicholy John Bunyan, 1682, Pilgrim's Progress  

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia 1682, Sam. Johnson, 1784, (1780?) Lives of ihe English Poets.

R. C. Trench, On the Study of Words George P. Marsh, lectures on ihe English Language, p. 133 S. A. Allibone, 1872, Crit. Diet. Eng. Literature, etc. .

Darwin, Origin of Species. . . H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Un veiled Her JIajesty the Queen, Leaves of our your. High lands     It seems, therefore, that the English of Madame Blavatsky is practically identical with that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which one might say is as nearly classically perfect as one could ask. The same test applied to her French writings would, doubtless, prove her to be as facile in the use of that beautiful language as the greatest of modern French authors.

CHAPTER XVI.

T PEFIN-.TIOX OF TERMS.

KFX >.c>'w --.re -are rci recard :he .-ai:horship or Isis -." "triwiV^", ar.c hc-w H, F. ?. * As :,' the fcnrer. i -o: :h-:: of H. ?, 5. o: jevfr.-. c;>;'.".'c: i*T:;erj a: .tIo--e. >[y j-fr;>::,xl crjer^.-.^;: tvilly bo-~e oa; "by •.vr.-x: she her??-: aa",::; i" r.er ex pl.'.r.,--:.-- Iet:e:j re her :-;:-^:',v, .-.< quoted by Mr. S.r.nett, tor fhe sovj tho.t all tho ronior.s which deal with subjects previov.s-v i:-f,t:i-.:I'„tr to her -^ere either dictatec to her br.tir. Jirtd h.tr.d ot her phvsio-. body, The o^restioti is hichlv oorap'ex. o.ud the ex.tot t--::hwfll ttever be h-o^r. .ti t.^ the shojre which e-tch of the p.trticio-tr.ts had :r. it. The versozoditv of H. ? ? •sr.ts the rcov.Id in '^'hich all the nicttter ■an.-.j c.t<t, -".ttd whtch^ tberet.re, cortrOL.evi :ts ',"-31, ce'.0"-::btc. -tr.d exvres^ior,. s? to s.t"', by ".;s own idto s"~cnc;es, tv.er.tat o.s well -".s pr-ys,cOia. ir rr. "ust .ts to.e   successive occupiers of the H. P. B. body only modified its habitual handwriting, but did not write their own,* so in using the H. P. B. brain, they were forced to allow it to colour their thoughts and arrange their words after a fixed personal fashion peculiar to it.

* A very curious fact is to be noticed in this connection, viz. , that the " Mahatma M.'s" handwriting, which was so carefully scrutinised by the S. P. R., their experts and agents, and said to resemble that of H. P. B., was a coarse, rough script, something like a collection of chopped roots and brush-wood, while the handwriting of the same personage in the Jsis MS. and in the notes he wr(^te me was totally different. It was a small, fine script, such as a lady might have writ ten, and while generally resembling H. P. B.'s own handwriting, yet differing from it so as to present an appearance of distinct indi viduality, which enabled me to recognise it as that personage's MS. whenever I saw it. I do not pretend to account for this fact, I only state it as something which must be recorded. It should be consid ered hereafter by whatever psychological experimentalist may be studying the general phenomenon of psychic writing through mediums, or intermediaries of a similar kind, whether by precipitation, control of the hand, or occupancy of the body. I think that such an inquiry will result in proving that such writing, when as closely analysed ns were the alleged Mahatma's writings by the S. P. R., always resem bles that of the intermediary to a greater or lesser extent, and without carrying the implication of bad faith on his or her part. Ignorance, or wilful disregard of this fact, caused the S. P. R.'s indictment against II. P. B. to lose almost all its point. The late W. Stainton Moses, M.A. (Oxon.), quotes in his work on Psychography, p. 125,  

Like as the daylight passing through cathedral windows becomes coloured to the tints of the stained glass, so the thoughts transmitted by them through H. P. B.'s peculiar brain would have to be modified into the literary style and habits of expression to which it had been by her developed. And even common sense teaches us that the closer the natural identity between the possessing intelligence and the intellectual and moral personality controlled, the easier should be the control, the more fluent the composition, the less involved the style. In point of fact what I noticed was this, that at times when the physical H. P. B. was in a state of supreme irascibility, the body was rarely occupied save by the Master whose own pupil and spiritual ward she was, and whose iron will was even stronger than her own ; the gentler philosophers keeping aloof. Naturally, I asked why a permanent control was not put upon her fiery temper, and why she should not always be modified into the quiet, self-centred sage that she became under certain obsessions. The answer was that from a letter to him from Mr. W. H. Harrison, formerly editor of The Spiritualist, and a very experienced observer of psychical phenomena, the following remarks about the messages through Dr. Slade : ' ' I noticed that they were nearly always in the handwriting of the medium ; and this, which, to an ignorant person, would have been indicative of imposture, was in favour of the genuineness of the phenomena to an expert. On leaving the room after the seance, I had a short talk with Mr. Simmons, and without telling him what I knew, but merely to test his integrity, I asked whether the handwriting on the slates bore any resemblance to that of Dr. Slade. Without hesitation, he replied that there was usually a strong resemblance. This shows the truthfulness and absence of exaggeration incidental to the statements of Mr. Simmons." Mr. Harrison adds that "before Dr. Slade came to London, years of observation at numerous seances had proved to me that the materialised hands common at seances were most frequently the duplicates of those of the medium, and produced nearly the same handwriting." And yet, in the presence of Slade, and another psychic, named Watkins, alleged "spirit messages" were written in some twenty different languages, none of which were known to the mediums nor written by them in the usual way of writing, but all either by precipitation or the manipulation of a crumb of pencil or crayon laid on a slate, which their hands did not touch. '7   such a course would inevitably lead to her death from apoplexy ; the body was vitalised by a fiery and imperious spirit, one which had from childhood brooked no restraint, and if vent were not allowed for the excessive corporeal energy, the result must be fatal. I was told to look into the history of her kinsfolk, the Russian Dolgoroukis, and I would understand what was meant. I did so and found that this princely and warlike family, tracing back to Rurik (ninth century A.D.), had been always distinguished by extreme courage, a daring equal to every emergency, a passionate love of personal independence, and a fearlessness of consequences in the carrying out of its wishes.

Prince Yakob, a Senator of Peter the Great, was a type of the family character. Disliking an imperial ukase, he tore it to pieces in full council of the Senate, and when the Tsar threatened to kill him, he replied : " You have but to imitate Alexander, and you will find a Clitus in me." (Am. Encyc, VI., 551.) This was H. P. B.'s own character to the life, and she more than once told me that she would not be controlled by any power on earth or out of it. The only persons she actually reverenced were the Masters, yet even towards them, she was occasionally so combative that, as above said, in certain of her moods the gentler ones could not, or did not approach her. To get herself into the frame of mind when she could have open intercourse with them had — as she had pathetically assured me — cost her years of the most desperate self-restraint. I doubt if any person had ever entered the Path against greater obstacles or with more self-suppression.

Of course, a brain so liable to disturbance was not the best adapted to the supremely delicate business of the mission she had taken upon herself ; but the Masters told me it was far and away the best now available, and they must get all they could out of it. She was to them loyalty and devotion personified, and ready to dare and suffer all for the sake of the Cause. Gifted beyond all other persons of her generation with innate psychical powers, and fired with an enthusiasm that ran into fanaticism, she supplied the element of fixity of purpose, which, conjoined with a phenomenal degree of bodily endurance, made her a most powerful, if not a very docile and equable agent. With less turbulence of spirit she would, probably, have turned out less faulty literary work, but instead of lasting seventeen years under the strain, she would, doubtless, have faded out of the body ten years earlier and her later writings have been lost to the world.

The fact that the psychic's personality distinctly modifies the extraneous writing that is done through her agency or intermediation, gives us, it seems to me, a test by which to judge of the genuineness of any communications alleged to have come from Mahatmas " M." or "K. H." since H. P. B.'s death. While she was alive their communications always, wherever received or by whomsoever apparently written, resembled her own handwriting to some extent. This is as true of the   letters which I phenomenally received on a steamer on the high seas and in railway carriages, as of those which dropped out of space, or otherwise phenomenally reached the hands of Mr. Sinnett, Mr. Hume, and other favoured correspondents of our Eastern teachers. For, where ever she might be, she was the vortex-ring through which they had to work with us in the evolution of our galaxy out of the nebula of modern thought. It did not matter at all whether she were with them in Tibet, or with me in New York, or with Mr. Sinnett at Simla : their co-operative affinity was psychical, hence as unaffected as thought itself, by questions of time and space. We have seen in the phenomenon of letters which were arrested in postal transit, written in, and made to reach me at Philadelphia instead of New York, a striking illustration of this principle in psycho-dynamics (Cf. Chapter II.). Bearing this in mind, the important deduction follows that the probabilities are as a hundred to one that any written communication alleged to be from either of the Masters and received since H. P. B.'s death is open to suspicion if the handwriting is the same as it used to be before that event. * Grant the premise, and the conclusion is inevitable. If all Mahatma MSB. in her time had to, and did, resemble in some degree her

 * This Chapter was originally published in July, 1893. My deduc tion has been objected to by some for whose judgment I have great respect. It may be that I am wrong, but at least I can say that I have seen no proofs to the contrary, even up to the present time (August, 1895). The specimens of Mahatma writing that have come to my notice since 1891 are, I fear, fraudulent imitations.   ;:'l , > s-^e Mr. iS<i. <;^^::d ri<i:":.c ;: ^r would ;<; i: ^1 --IS ;~ :he ^-:<; ^; K. " ?.. -^^s? :r.;:->"-::;;c c\:'Ci i fc Aft/ *nf i««^<«i^ or ,~.rovve-d ov.; c: sv-:,-; r^eior^ _ -.e < _-,---,-; rj f-br-,: ""-::;" I >;r, "C i»iv:>^ ill --.v r^ii^^^   to follow the same rule if they would be on the safe side : better far an enlightened scepticism than the most lauded credulity. For remember that probably no one has ever received a line in English from a Master in his own normal handwriting and written by him in the usual way, unless possibly we i.xc.e|)t the note which K. H. formed in my own hand when he visited me in his physical body, one night in my tent at Lahore, in 1883. I should not care to dogmatise even about that, as I did not see him write it, and he may have created the letter then and there through the H. P. B. aura that went everywhere with me. Besides K. H. and the old Platonist above mentioned, none of the Masters had Icarnt to write English, and when they did write it, they had to resort to the same abnormal method as that used by H. P. B. at Benares to write the Hindi note, in Devand gari characters, to Swami Daydnand Saraswati, above alluded to. In this connection the two completely dis similar handwritings of Mahatma M. in the Isis MSS. of 1875-7 and the Indian letters to sundry persons after 1879, must be kept in mind. When H. P. B. wrote to the Masters or they to her, on business that was not to be communicated to third parties, it was in an archaic language, said to be " Senzar," which resembles Tibetan, and which she wrote as fluently as she did Russian, French, or English. In fact, I have preserved a note I received from one of the Masters while in New York, along the top of which is written, in pure '/'i1)clan characters in a sort of gold ink, the word " Sernj d\i3.h." I had   shown it to no one all these years, until quite recently at Calcutta, when Pandit Sarat Chandra Das, C. I. E., the Tibetan explorer and scholar, translated it for me as meaning " Of powerful heart " — an honorific title given in Tibet to a Bodhisattva.

There was another and supreme reason why the Masters dare not control and compel H. P. B.'s innate character to be softened and refined into the higher ideal of a benevolent and gentle Sage independently of her own volition. To do so would have been an unlawful interference with her personal Karma — as I may now express it. Like every other human being, she represented, as she then was, a certain personal equation, the fruit of a certain evolutionary progress of her entity. It was its Karma to have been born this time in just such a tumultuous female body and to have the chances thus offered to gain spiritual progress by a life-long combat against its hereditary passions. To have interfered with that by benumbing the violent temper and suppressing the other personal defects of character, would have been a grievous wrong to her without hastening her evolution one whit : it would have been something like the keeping of a hypnotic sensitive perpetually under the hypnotiser's will, or an invalid permanently stupefied by a narcotic. There were intervals when her body was not occupied by the writing Mahatmas, nor her mind absorbed in taking down what was dictated to her : at least I assume it to be so, although I have sometimes been even tempted to suspect that none of us, her colleagues, ever knew the normal H. P. B. at all, but that we just dealt with an artificially animated body, a sort of perpetual psychical mystery, from which the proper jtva was killed out at the battle of Montana, when she received those five wounds and was picked out of a ditch for dead. There is nothing intrinsically impossible in this theory, since we have the historical fact that the normal personality of the girl Mary Reynolds was thrust aside or obliterated for the space of forty-two years, while her body was occupied, energised and controlled by another personality, which had no knowledge of the eighteen years' experiences and reminiscences of the normal self prior to this replacement. As regards H. P. B., I do not assert but only theorise, for I dare not say positively who this marvel of a woman, or, as M. de Buffon would have classified her, this homo duplex, was. She was such a bundle of contradictions, so utterly incapable of being classified like any of us common folk, that as a conscientious man I shrink from anything like dogmatic assertion. What ever she may have said to myself or anybody else, counts with me for very, very little, for having lived and travelled with her so long, and been present at so very many of her interviews with third parties, I have heard her tell the most conflicting stories about herself. To have been open and communicative would have been to betray the residences and personalities of her Teachers to that multitude of self-seekers whose egotistic importunities have ever driven the would-be Yogi to the seclusion of the cave or forest. She chose as the easiest way out of  the difficulty to contradict herself and throw the minds of her friends into confusion. How easy it would have been for her, for example, to have told Mr. Sinnett that, when trying to enter Tibet in 1854, md Bhutan or Nepal, she was turned back by Capt. (now Maj.-Genl.) Murray, the military commandant of that part of the frontier, and kept in his house in his wife's company a whole month. Yet she never did, nor did any of her friends ever hear of the circumstance until Mr. Edge and I got the story from Major-General Murray himself, on the 3rd March last, in the train between Nalhati and Calcutta, and I had printed it. So as to her age, she told all sorts of stories, making herself twenty, forty, even sixty and seventy years older than she really was. We have in our scrap-books certain of these tales, reported by successive interviewers and correspondents to their journals, after personal interviews with her, and on sundry occasions when I was present myself.* She said to me in excuse that the Somebodies inside her body at these various times were of these various ages, and hence no real falsehood was told, although the auditor saw only the H. P. B. shell and thought what was said referred only to that !

*Cf. an interviewer's report in the Hartford Daily Times, December 2, 1878. She had been making herself out a sort of Methusaleh, and the correspondent writes: " Very, very old? Impossible. And yet she declares it is so ; sometimes indignantly, sometimes with a certain pride, sometimes with indifference or impatience. ' I came of a very long-lived race. All my people grow to be very old. . . . You doubt my age ? I can show you my passports, my documents, my letters for years back. I can prove it by a thousand things.' " It was a large way she had of knocking the numerals about ! Like that of the Sikh Akali (vide Mr. Maclagan's Punjab Census Report of 1891) who dreams of armies and thinks in lakhs ; '' — (a lakh is 100,000). " If he wishes to imply that five Akalis are present, he will say that five lakhs are before you." The Phrenological yournal for March, 1878, contains her portrait and character-sketch. The writer says : "In the course of her long life — for she is upward of eighty years old — etc. '' I myself heard her tell this jfarn to the writer of the article.   I have used the word " obsession " above, but am well aware of its wretched insufficiency in this case. Both "obsession" and "possession" have been made to signify the troubling of a living person by evil spirits or demons : an obsessed person is one vexed or besieged, a possessed person one who is possessed, controlled, over shadowed, or occupied by them. Yet what other term is available in English? Why did not the early Fathers invent a more decent word to signify the possession, control, occupancy, or overshadowing of a person by good spirits than that of "filling," or even let obsession and possession stand for that also? " And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance." But this will not help us unless we ignore the circumstance that H. P. B.'s body became, at times, occupied by other entities — how far let the following anecdote suggest. She and I were in our literary work room in New York one summer day after dinner. It was early twilight, and the gas had not been lighted. She sat over by the South front window, I stood on the rug before the mantle-piece, thinking. I heard her say   "Look and learn" ; and glancing that way, saw a mist rising from her head and shoulders. Presently it defined itself into the likeness of one of the Mahatmas, the one who, later, gave me the historical turban, but the astral double of which he now wore on his mist-born head. Absorbed in watching the phenomenon, I stood silent and motionless. The shadowy shape only formed for itself the upper half of the torso, and then faded away and was gone ; whether re-absorbed into H. P. B.'s body or not, I do not know. She sat statue-like for two or three minutes, after which she sighed, came to herself, and asked me if I had seen anything. When I asked her to explain the phenomenon she refused, saying that it was for me to develop my intuition so as to understand the phenomena of the world I lived in. All she could do was to help in showing me things and let me make what I could of them.  

Numerous witnesses can testify to another phenomenon which may or may not go towards proving that other entities were sometimes occupying the H. P. B. body. On five different occasions — once to please Miss Emily Kislingbury, and once my sister, Mrs. Mitchell, I remember — she gathered up a lock of her fine, wavy auburn hair, and either pulled it out by the roots or cut it off with scissors, and gave it to one of us. But the lock would be coarse, jet black, straight and without the least curliness or waviness in it ; in other words, Hindu or other Asiatic human hair, and not in the least like her own flossy, baby-like, light-brown locks. My Diary for 1878 shows that other two occasions were on July 9th, when she did the thing for Hon. J. L. O'Sullivan, ex-U. S. Minister to Portugal, and on November 19th, when she did it for Miss Rosa Bates in the presence of six other witnesses besides Miss Bates and H. P. B. and myself. The enemy may suggest that this was but a trick of simple TWO LOCKS OF HAIR CUT BY AUTHOR FROM H. P. B.'S HEAD ON THE SAME EVENING. " palming," but that is met by the statement that in the case of the lock given to Miss Kislingbury or my sister — I forget which — the recipient was allowed to take the scissors and cut out the lock herself. I have two locks taken from her head, both black as jet and far coarser than hers, but one distinctly coarser than the other. The former is Egyptian, and the latter Hindu hair.

  What better explanation of this phenomenon is there than that of supposing that the men to whom these black locks had belonged were actually occupying the mayavic H. P. B. body when they were removed from the head ? But to return to our philological difficulty.

The word epistasis will not do for us ; for that means "inspection, superintendence, command, management," which does not cover the case. Epiphany is not much better, epiphaneia being a shining upon, manifestation, etc., etc. We have no word; yet one is greatly needed at this stage of our psychical research, and for it we must go to the East.

This occupancy by living persons of another living person's body, though so outside our Western experience that we have no word for it is, like all else in psychological science, known and defined in India. A'ves'a (pronounced Ahveysha) is the act of possessing, i. e., entering and controlling, a human body belonging to a living being (jiva). It is of two kinds : when the Adept's own ams'a (sukshma startra), or astral body, is withdrawn from his own physical body and introduced into the other person's body, it is thtn caWed svartipdves' a ; but when by his mere sankalpa (will-power) he influences, broods over, or controls that other person's (Jiva) body to do that which would otherwise be beyond its power, e.g., to speak an unlearnt foreign tongue, to understand unfamiliar branches of knowledge, to instantly disappear from the sight of bystanders, to transform itself into a terrifying shape, as of a serpent or a ferocious animal,   etc., then the thing is called saktydves'a. This gives us all we need, and so, as we took " Epiphany " from the Greek, why should we not all agree to adopt the easy word A'ves'a from the Sanskrit, since it is ready to our hand and means the very thing that we, toddling babes in the nursery of adeptship, must have to get on with in our studies ? It applies only to the psychical commerce between two living persons or to the overshadowing and inspiration of a living person by a superior spiritual entity, and must not be degraded to signify the occupancy of a medium's body or its control for the production of phenomena, by a dead man's soul. That is called grahana, and the elementary (dead man's soul) graham (pronounced grah-hum). The same word is used to express the occupancy of a living body by an elemental, or Nature-spirit. Such occupancy may be (a) spontaneous, i. e., effected by the attraction of the elemental towards a psychic ; or (b) compulsory, i. e., compelled by the will of a sorcerer or magician who has learnt the formulas for subjecting an elemental or elementary to his control. I got in Japan a photograph of a bronze group representing Ko-bo-dai-shi, the alleged Adept founder of the Shingon sect, with two little elementals crouched at his feet and awaiting his pleasure. A monk of the Yama-busi sect — that of the wonder-workers of Japan — gave me a scroll wall-painting of the Founder of his sect with attendant elemental servants. This picture now hangs in H. P. B.'s old room in London. She, her self, had also such servants obedient to her. 

There is an old and amusing Indian story of how King Vikramadityd conquered the obstinacy of the Princess Pes'dmadandd who had made a vow to keep silent and marry nobody who could not compel her to answer his questions. The mighty king magician got astride his favourite elementary — not elemental — the Brahmardkshds Bhetala, and made him transport him into the very chamber of the lady. Finding that she would not answer him in the natural way, he made Bhetala obsess all her ladies-in-waiting and set them to praising him, telling him a story, and reproaching their mistress for her silence. Thereupon she sent them out of the room. The Princess then drew a curtain between herself and the king, but the spirit was made to enter the curtain and set it talking. The Princess pushed the curtain aside ; whereupon her petticoat took up the conversation, and she cast that aside. Then the robe was made to speak, then the undergarment, then the four legs of her charpai or lounge ; but the stubborn damsel held her tongue. Finally Bhetdla was made to show (materialise) himself as a parrot, was caught by the Princess's order and given to her, and it straightway went on to tell a story about the Princess being obsesssed by S'ani, the god of 111 Luck. This was too much for her ; she flung herself at Vikram's feet, confessed herself vanquished, and as he did not want her for wife, was given by him in marriage to a suitable Prince. The story is given in Fdsdmadand^ Kathai, a Tamil story book.

The weighty subject of A'ves'a is treated of in the Laghu Sabddrtha Sarvasva of Mahdmahop4dhyaya Paravastu Vencatarungacharya, Vol. I., p. 316, art. Avatdra. All intelligent Western readers of theosophical literature have heard of the Hindu theory of Avatars — the Avatars of Vishnu, the visible manifestations of the protecting care of God over erring mankind, the proofs of his desire to keep them walking in the path of religious aspiration. Avataras are of two kinds : Pradurbhdva and A'ves'a. The act of assuming a body which is not presided over, or rather animated by, a jiva, is called Pridurbhava, of which Rama and Krishna are cited as examples. What A'ves'a is, has been shown above. We find in Fdnchardtra Pddmasamhitd Charydpada, Chapter XXIV., verses 131-140, full instructions for performing the A'ves'a :

" I now tell thee, O Lotus-born, the method by which to enter another's body (Pindam). . . . The corpse to be occupied should be fresh, pure, of middle age, endued with all good qualities and free from the awful diseases resulting from sin (viz., syphilis, leprosy, etc.) The body should be that of a Brahmin or even of a Kshatriya. It should be laid out in some secluded place (where there is no risk of interruption during the ceremonial process), with its face turned towards the sky and its legs straightened out. Beside its legs, shouldst thou seat thyself in Yogdsana (a posture of yoga), but previously, O four-faced one, shouldst thou with fixed and mental concentration, have long exercised this yoga power. The jiva is located in the ndbhichakra (solar plexus), is of itself radiant as the sun and of the form of hamsa (a bird)* and it moves along the Ida and Pingala nadis (two alleged channels of psychic circulation). Having been concentrated as hamsa (by yoga), it will pass out through the nostrils, and, like a bird, dart through space. Thou shouldst accustom thyself to this exercise, sending out the Prana to the height of a palm-tree, and causing it to travel a mile, or five miles or more, and then re-attracting it into thy body, which it must re-enter as it left it, through the nostrils, and restore it to its natural centre in the nabhichakra. This must be practised daily until perfection be reached."

Then, having acquired the requisite skill, the Yogi may attempt the experiment of psychical transfer and, seated as above described, he will be able to withdraw his Prana-jiva from his own body, and introduce it into the chosen corpse, by the path of the nostrils, until it reaches the empty solar-plexus, there establishes its residence, reanimates the deceased person, and causes him to be seen as though "risen from the dead."  

* Hamsa is " Soham" inverted, which means " That I am," re ferring to Parabrahm. Thus Parabrahm = Jivatma = Soham = Hamsa. But at the same time Hamsa being also the name of a divine bird supposed to possess the power of separating milk from water, it is made to esoterically represent A'tma. This is what is meant by the text " of the form of the bird Hamsa." Hamsa is that " silvery spark in the brain," that starry spark which is " not the soul, but the halo around the soul," so vividly described by Bulwer Lytton in the XXXI. chapter of A Strange Story.   The story of the rcsuscitalion of the body of the <lc f:casc(I Raj;ili Aiiiaraka of Aiiirilaimra by llii: Sajfc S'ankardchiirya, given by Mddhava, one of his biof^ra phers, has lieen very widely read. A ii'siinu'tA it will be found in the article" Life of S'ankarai h.'irya, l-U." con lril)Utcd by Mr. (latiT Justic-,e) K.'J'. 'ICIaii)^, on paf^c («) of the numljer of tJu; T/uuisoplilst for January, r88o. The Sage had ple(lt;;cd himself, if granted one month's ris|iilc, to answer questions propoiindud to him by the: wife of Sage Mandaiia Misra upon the science of l,ove, wilh which he, a celibate from childhood, was totally iinai  i|uainted. Journeying with his dis< iples, lie re,i< bed the vicinity of Amritapura and saw the Kajah's corpse lying at the foot of a tree, surroiind(Ml by mourners. 'I'his was his chance to acquire the desired knowledge practically, sf; leaving bis body to the care of his disciples, he withdrew from it hia prdna-jiva, entered the body of the King, and amid the tinnultiioiis joy of his subjects (jverthe supposed resuscitation, went to the capital and for some months lived the usual Zenana, life of a sovereign ruler, and finally answered the questions about love.* The details need not be given here, my object being merely to use the incident in connection with the problem of H. P. B., as an illustration of the recognised power of A'ves'a possessed by a Yogi. MddliavatJidrya's S' ankaravijdya thus desf ribes it :  

"Withdrawing the (l'r;'Hi;i) Vdyu from the extremities of the toes and emerging through the brahmardndhra, the ♦ Vide " Kama Siilra."  

knower of Yoga (S'ankara) entered, and, by slow degrees, occupied the whole body of the dead (King) down to its very feet."

By an interesting coincidence, I had just read this passage when a certain circumstance flashed into my memory, and I turned over my old New York files of letters and memoranda until I had found the following. It occurs in some notes I made at the time, of a conversation between myself and one of the Mahatmas, a Hungarian by birth, who, on that evening, occupied H. P. B.'s body :

" He shades his eyes and turns down the gas in the standing burner on the table. Ask him why. Says that light is a physical force, and entering the eye of an un occupied body, encounters — i. e., strikes against, the astral soul of the temporary occupant, gives it a shock and such a push that the occupant might be pushed out. Paralysis of the occupied body is even possible. Extreme caution must be used in entering a body, and one cannot thoroughly fit oneself to it throughout until the automatic movements of the circulation, breathing, etc., adjust themselves to the automatism of the occupier's own body — with which, however far distant, his projected astral body is most intimately related. I then lit a burner of the chandelier overhead, but the occupier at once held a newspaper so as to shade the crown of the head from the light. Surprised, I asked for an explanation, and was told that it was even more dangerous to have a strong top light strike upon the crown of the head than to have light shine into the eyes."

I knew nothing then about the six vital centres (shat chakramas) of the body ; nor was I aware that the most important of them, the brahmardndhra, was under the parietal bones ; nor that it is the <:u.sloin in India to break the skull of the burning corpes at that place will facilitate the withdrawal of the astral body of the deceased : moreover, I had not then read the story of S'ankardch;irya's leaving his own body and entering that of the deceased Rajah by that path of the soul. I simply saw what the Mahatma did, and wondered over his explanation ; but now, in the fulness of time, the mystery is cleared up and the cases of New York and Amritapura are mutually related. By the light of the latter and the teachings of Aryan occult science, one can more readily comprehend the mystery of the former. Whereas before all was dark, and we had not even a name at our disposal to explain the fact, we can now see that it is possible for any one versed in Yoga to occupy the body of another living person, when the astral body of its owner has been withdrawn and the empty house is placed at the disposal of visiting friends. The bearing which this matter has upon the problem of H. P. B. is most evident ; as I shall try to show in the next chapter,  

CHAPTER XVII.  

RE-INCARNATION.

THE first effect of proving the collaborate nature of Isis Unveiled, is to confirm our critical view of its registered author : she remains a mental prodigy, yet drops out of the literary class which includes such giants of acquired knowledge as Aristotle, Longinus, Buddaghosha, Hiouen Thsang, Alberuni, Mddhavichdrya, Nasireddin — the Persian philosopher and cyclopasdist — and in modern times, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Spencer, etc. The justness of her self-estimate is shown, and, without, ranking as erudite, she becomes an almost unique problem among Western people. If the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays be disproved, then Shakespeare's production of them, when his vagabond disposition and commonplace character are taken into account, rather supports than contradicts the theory that, like H. P. B., he was but an agent of greater, unseen, living intellects, who controlled his body and used it to write things far beyond his normal capacity. The comparison is to his advantage, because we find in his works a far deeper aquaintance with human nature and wider grasp of intuitive knowledge than in hers. His natural mind (or that which was drawn from) seems to have contained from the beginning all that he would ever be obliged to utilise ; whereas she appears to have been the subject of a distinct mental evolution. Take, for instance, her teachings on Re-incarnation, the strong foundation-stone of the ancient occult philosophy, which was affirmed in the Secret Doctrine and her other later writings. When we worked on Isis it was neither taught us by the Mahatmas, nor supported by her in literary con troversies or private discussions of those earlier days. She held to, and defended, the theory that human souls, after death, passed on by a course of purificatory evolu tion to other and more spiritualised planets. I have notes of a conversation between a Mahdtma and myself in which this same theory is affirmed. And this puzzles me most of all ; for, while it is quite conceivable that, either through imperfect cerebro-psychic training, or otherwise, she, the pupil and psychic agent, might not have known the solid philosophical basis of the Re-incarnation theory, I can scarcely see how the like ignorance could extend to the Adept and Teacher. Is it possible that Re-incarnation was not taught this Adept by his Master, and that he, as well as H. P. B., had to learn it subsequently ? There are said to be sixty-three stages of Adeptship, and it is not impossible. There are, among them, I was told, men who are great natural psychics yet almost illiterate ; and at least one who, like Buddha's favourite, An;uida, possesses no Su/t/kis, 3'et is so intui  tional as to be able to understand all esoteric writings at sight. My notes report the Teacher as telling me that " Souls go hence after death to other planets. Souls that are to be born on this Earth are waiting in other invisible planets." These two statements agree with the latest teachings of H. P. B., the planets in question at either end of the soul's earthly habitation being members of our " chain of globes." But there is left a vast hiatus between the two extremes, that we now understand to be filled with the multitudinous evolutionary re-births of the travelling entity. Let the note stand as it is, but H. P. B., in Isis (Vol. I., p. 351) says most unequivocally.  

" We will now present a few fragments of this mysterious doctrine of Re-incarnation — as distinct from transmigration — 7C'/ii\-/t 70 /i<i:'< from an aut/w? ify. Re incarnation, /. (•., the appearance of the same individual, or rather of his astral monad, twice on the same planet, is 7hit a rulf in fiatuir ; it is iin iwcr/fiti/i, like the terato logical phenomenon of a two-headed infant."

The cause of it, when it does occur is, she says, that the design of nature to produce a perfect human being has been interfered with, and therefore she must make another attempt. Such exceptional interferences, H. P. B. explains, are the cases of abortion, of infants dying before a certain age, and of congenital and incurable idiocy. In such cases, the higher principles have not been able to unite themselves with the lower, and hence a perfect being has not been born. But —   " If reason has been so far developed as to become active and discriminative, there is no Re-incarnation on this Earth, for the three parts of the triune man have been united together, and he is capable of running the race. But when the new being has not passed beyond the condition of monad, or when, as in the idiot, the trinity has not been completed, the immortal spark which illuminates it has to re-enter on the earthly plane, as it was frustrated in its first attempt. Otherwise, the mortal or astral, and the immortal, or divine, souls could not progress in unison and pass onward to the sphere above."

The italics are mine, and thus I was taught. My present belief is that of the Hindus and Buddhists. She told Mr. Walter R. Old — who is my informant — that she was not taught the doctrine of Re-incarnation until 1879 — when we were in India. I willingly accept that statement, both because it tallies with our beliefs and writings in New York, and, because, if she knew it when we were writing Isis, there was no earthly reason why she should have misled me or others, even if she had so desired, which I do not believe.

She and I believed, and taught orally as well as wrote that man is a trinity of physical body, astral body (soul — the Greek psuch^), and divine spirit. This will be found set forth in the first official communication made by us to the European reading public. It was an article entitled " The Views of the Theosophists," and appeared in xhs Spiritualist for December 7, 1877. In it, speaking for our whole party, I say :  

■■ We believe that the man of flesh dies, decays, and goes to the crucible of evolution, to be worked over and over again ; that the astral man (or double, or soul), freed from physical imprisonment, is followed by the consequences of his earthly deeds, thoughts and desires. He either becomes purged of the last traces of earthly grossness, and, finally, after an incalculable lapse of time, is joined to his divine spirit, and lives forever as an entity, or, having been completely debased on earth, he sinks deeper into matter and is annihilated."

I go on to say that " the man of pure life and spirituality of aspiration would be drawn towards a more spiritual realm than this earth of ours and repelled by its influence " ; while, on the other hand, the vicious and thoroughly depraved person would have lost his spirit during life, be reduced to a duality instead of a trinity at the hour of death, and, upon passing out of the physical body, become disintegrated ; its grosser matter going into the ground and its finer turning into a bktit, or " elementary" " wandering in and about the habitations of men, obsessing sensitises to glut vicariously its depraved appetites, until its life is burnt out by their very intensity and dissolution comes to crown the dreadful career."

This was the sum and substance of our teaching at that time about the nature and destiny of man, and shows how infinitely far away from believing in Re-incarnation H. P. B. and I were then. If any one should be disposed to say that this letter of mine in the Spiriiualist represents only my personal views, and that neither the Masters nor H. P. B. are responsible for my crudities, I shall just refer them to the issue of the Spiritualist for February 8, 1878,* where appears a letter from H. P. B. herself upon the general subject of my letter ; which had aroused a most animated discussion between the chief exponents of British Spiritualism on the one side, and C. C. Massey, John Storer Cobb, Prof. Alex. Wilder, Miss Kislingbury, Dr. C. Carter Blake, Gerald Massey and myself, on the other, and been called by M. A. (Oxon.) " a Theosophical rock hurled by the vigorous arm of the P. T. S. and creating a huge splash " in the unhealthy pool of trans-Atlantic Spiritualism. H. P. B.'s clarion, as usual, waked the echoes. She calls herself "the unattractive old party superficially known as H. P. Blavatsky " — a most significant phrase ; says that "the Colonel corresponds directly with Hindu scholars, and has from them a good deal more than he can get from so clumsy a preceptor as myself ; " and that she thinks I have "thrown out some hints worthy of the thoughtful consideration of the unprejudiced." A second letter from me in answer to M. A. (Oxon.) appeared in February, and a very long, very powerful, and very explicit one from H. P. B., of date N. Y., January 14, 1878, did appear in the Spiritualist of February 8, of the same year. This whole letter is well worth reading. In it she says, a propos of the necessity that an Ego which has failed to unite itself with the physico-psychical duality of "Apparently the wrong date has been pasted above the cutting in our scrap-book. I think it must have been February if  a child who prematurely dies, should re-incamate — " Man's cycle is not complete until he becomes individually immortal. No one stage of probation and experience can be skipped over. He must be a man before he can become a spirit. A dead child is a failure of nature — he must live again : and the same /•siic^,c re-enters the physical plane through another birth. Such cjsis, together iL-ith t/:osc ■:■/ ccnrc-iita! idiots a'-:, as staUJ in " Is^is L'/i z'cii'cd." the cpay instaiuii cf kufnar: rc-irh\irnatii.m. Can an)-thing be plainer ? Our partj' left New York for India on Dec. 17, 1S7S, and a few days previously H. P. B. wrote to the Rcvuc Sn'ritt, of Paris, an article which appeared in that magazine, Tan. i, 1S79 ; it was in answer to sundrs' critics. She now describes man as four-principled, a " tetraktis ' or quatemar)". I translate : " Yes, ' for the Theosophists of New York, man is a trinity, and not a duality".' He is, however, more than that : for, by adding the physical body, man is a Tcirak tis. or quaternary-. But, however supported in this particular doctrine we may be by the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece, it is neither to Pythagoras, to Plato, nor, furthermore, to the celebrated Thtodidjktci of the school of Alexandria, that we owe it. We shall speak further on of our Masters." After citing passages from various ancient authorities in support of the views presented, she says : " our Masters [meaning those from whom we learnt the doctrine] are Patanjali, Kapila, Kanada, all the systems and  schools of A'ryavarta which served as inexhaustible mines for the Greek philosophers, from Pythagoras to Plato." Not all the Indian schools, certainly, for among them the old sects of Charvakas and Brihaspatis denied the survival of man after death, and were almost exact prototypes of our modern Materialists. It is also to be noted that Patanjali, Kapila, and the other Masters she names, taught that Re-incarnation is the rule in Nature, while she and I declared it to be the exception. Ultimately, the doctrine of Re-incarnation was fully accepted and expounded, both in its exoteric sense and esoterically. Not publicly taught so early as 1879, however, for it is not to be found in the first two volumes of the Theosophist, but only appears in the third, and then in connection with the Fragments of Occult Truth, a series of essays, chiefly by Mr. A. P. Sinnett, and based upon instructions given him by the Masters and by H. P. B. In its plain exoteric, or orthodox form, I had got it in Ceylon and embodied it in the Buddhist Catechism, of which the first edition, after passing through the ordeal of critical examination by the High Priest Sumangala Thero, appeared in July, 1881. The Catechism, of course, was only a synopsis of the doctrines of Southern Buddhism, not a proclamation of personal beliefs. The exposition of the Re-incarnation theory was rather meagre in the first edition ; but it was given at much greater length in the revised edition of 1882, where I defined the relation of the re-incarnated being of this birth to that of the preceding ones, and answered the question why we have no memory of experiences in prior incarnations. A conversation with Sumingala Thero upon the morality of the theory of Karma, led me to frame the note defining the difference between Personality and Individualit) , between physical memory, or the recollection of things which pertain to the ordinary waking consciousness, and spiritual memory, which has to do with the experiences of the Higher Self and its Individuality. The distinction had not previously been made, but it was at once accepted and has been propagated by all our chief Theosophical writers since that time. H. P. B. adopted it, and has introduced it in her X"rv to Thccsi>fhy (pp. 1J4 and 150), with enlargements and illustrations. These are historical facts, and their bearing upon the present discussion is evident. H. P. B.'s first published declaration that Re-incarnation was an element in Theosopliical belief occurs in the leading article of the first number ever issued of the Theosophist (Whai is Th^osv^-y ? Vol. I., p. 3. October, 1S79). It was but a bare allusion to the subject and nothing more. " Theosophy," she says, "believes sl&o \n Anastasis, or continued existence, and in transmigration (evolution), or a series of changes in the soul, which can be defended and explained on strict philosophical principles ; and only by making a distinction between Param <j.'";.y (transcendental, supreme soul) and j'h\ii":a (animal, or conscious soul), of the Yedautins."* This is * AnjistjisL' di>e* not mean Re-incarnation, bat a raising from the dead of the same person : and p.: .;.').; is not the animal sonl — as even all youiiLrer Theosophi--is are a«are.   extremely vague, and does little towards solving the dif ficulty. In a foot-note to this passage, however, she promises a series of articles on The World's Great The osopkisis, in which, says she, " we intend showing that from Pythagoras, who got his wisdom in India, down to our best known modern philosophers and Theosophists — David Hume and Shelley, the English poet, and the spiritists of France, included — many believed and yet believe in metempsychosis, or Re-incarnation of the soul, etc." But she does not clearly say what is her own belief. The promised series of articles most unfor tunately never appeared, though it may have been the germ of her idea to devote one of the new volumes of The Secret Doctrine to an account of the Great Adepts.  

Mr. Sinnett's famous series of essays entitled Frag ments of Occult Truth was begun by H. P. B. in No. i, of Vol. III., of the Theosophist, as an answer to Mr, Terry, of Melbourne, who had taken exception to the anti-spiritualistic views of Theosophists. In the first Fragment, she reiterates the teaching of New York, that the soul at death passes into another world, " the so called world of effects (in reality, a state and not a place), and there, purified of much of its material taints, evolves out of itself a new Ego, to be re-born (after a brief period of freedom and enjoyment) in the next higher world of causes, an objective world similar to this present globe of ours, but higher in the spiritual scale, where matter and material tendencies play a far less   important part than here." Re-incarnation is herein postulated, but not on this globe nor by the same Ego, but by another one which generates out of our present one in an interplanetary state. In Fragment No. j (TkeosoJ>hist for Sept., 1882), the new Ego is said after passing its normal time — according to its merit, which agrees with the doctrine taught by S'ri Krishna, in the Bhagavadgita — in a state of felicity (Uevachan) either to pass on to the " next superior planet," or return for re-birth on this globe " if it has not completed its ap pointed tale of earth-lives." Previously to this there had been nothing published about an appointed number of Re-incarnations, either on this globe or others, but only the outlines sketched of a psychic pilgrimage, or evolutionary progress from star to star, of a Divine Self which clothed itself with a new soul-body in each palin genesis.

In 1880, we two visited Simla, and Mr. A. O. Hume enjoyed the good fortune, which had previously fallen to Mr. Sinnett's lot, of getting into correspondence with our Mahatmas. H. P. B. revisited Simla without me in 1881, and the two friends above-named received in due time from the Masters the Re-incarnation theory. Mr. Sinnett expounded it in Fragment No. 4 (Theosopkisi, Vol. IV., No. I, October, 1882), where he laid the basis of the doctrine of terrestrial Re-incarnations in a series of major and minor, or root and sub-races, and the ex tension of the process to the other planets of a chain to which the Earth belongs. Mr. Hume did the same in   his Hints on Esoteric Theosophy (Calcutta, August, 1882), where he synthetically says that " man has many complete rounds to make of the entire cycle (chain, he means) of the planets. And in each planet, in each round, he has many lives to live. At a certain stage of his evolution, when certain portions of his less material elements are fully developed, he becomes morally re sponsible." (Op. cit., p. 52.)

Thus, six years after the date of my New York con versation with the Mahitmi, the fundamental and neces sary idea of Re-incarnation was launched on the sea of modern Western thought from the congenial land of its primeval birth.

I have been obliged to trace its evolution within our lines at the risk of a small digression, as it was necessary for the future welfare of the Society to show the apparent baselessness of the theory that our present grand block of teaching had been in H. P. B.'s possession from the beginning. That theory I consider pernicious and without foundation. If I am wrong, I shall be most happy to be corrected. To admit it would involve the necessity of conceding that she had knowingly and wilfully lent herself to deception and the teaching of untruth in Isis, and later. I believe that she wrote then as she did later, exactly according to her lights, and that she was just as sincere in denying Re-incarnation in i876-'78 as she was in affirming it after 1882. Why she and I were permitted to put the mis-statement into Isis, and, especially, why it was made to me by the Mahatma, I cannot explain, unless I was the victim of glamour in believing that I talked with a Master on the evening in question. So let it pass. The Masters could give H. P. B. whatever they chose by dictation, they could write it themselves with her hand by occupying her physical body, and they could enable me to write by giving me hints and outlines and then helping my intuitions. Yet, notwithstanding all this, they certainly did not teach us what we now accept as the truth about Re-incarnation ; nor bid us keep silent about it ; nor resort to any vague generalities capable of being now twisted into an appar ent agreement with our present views ; nor interpose to prevent us from writing and teaching the heretical and unscientific idea that, save in certain few cases, the human entity was not, and could not, be re-incarnated on one and the same planet.*

To return to the matter of the occupancy (dves'a) of H. P. B.'s body. There was one collateral proof con tinually thrusting itself upon one's notice, if one but paid attention to it. Let us say that the Master A or B had been " on guard " an hour or more, had been working on Ist's, alone or jointly with me, and was at a given moment saying something to me or, if third parties were present, to one of them. Suddenly she (he ?) stops speaking, rises and leaves the room, excusing herself for a moment on some pretext to strangers.

* Some valued friends have tried to persuade me to omit all the foregoing argument about the genesis of the Re-incarnation idea within our movement, but I cannot see it as my duty to do so. I will no more suppress important facts than I will make false statements.  

She presently returns, looks around as any new arrival would upon entering a room where there was company, makes herself a fresh cigarette, and says something which has not the least reference to what had been talked about when she left the room. Someone present, wishing to keep her to the point, asks her kindly to explain. She shows embarrassment and inability to pick up the thread ; perhaps expresses an opinion flatly contradicting what she had just affirmed, and when taken to task, becomes vexed and says strong things ; or, when told that she had said so-and-so, appears to take an introspective glance and says, " Oh yes : excuse me," and goes on with her subject. She was sometimes as quick as lightning in these changes, and I myself, forgetting her multiplex personality, have often been very irritated for her seeming inability to keep to the same opinion, and her bold denial that she had not said what she had certainly said plainly enough, the moment before. In due time, it was explained to me that it takes time, after entering another's living body, to link on one's own consciousness with the brain memory of the preceding occupier, and that if one tries to continue a conversation before this adjustment is complete, just such mistakes as the above may occur. This accords with what the Mahatma told me in New York about occupancy, and with the description of the way in which, we were told in Shankaravijdya* Shankara entered the defunct Rajah Amaraki's body : " entered and by slow degrees occupied the whole body of the dead down to its very feet."

* In a recent Calcutta lecture on " The Kinship between Hinduism and Buddhism " I show that the best Orientalists regard Shanka  

 The explanation of the gradual blending of the two jtvas in one steady heart and other bodily automatism (Cf. XVI.) extends to the matter of the two consciousnesses, and until this is perfected, there must be just such a confusion of ideas, assertions, and recollections as I have above described, and as the majority of H. P. B.'s visitors must have been puzzled by. Sometimes, when we were alone, has either the departing Somebody said : " I must put this into the brain so that my successor may find it there," or the incoming Somebody after greeting me with a friendly word, asked me what was the subject of discussion before the "change."

I have noted above how various Mahatmas, in writing to me about H. P. B. and her body, spoke of the latter as a shell occupied by one of themselves. In my Diary of 1878, I find entered under date of October 12, and in the H. P. B. manuscript of Mahatma " M," the follow ing : " H. P. B. talked with W. alone until 2 after mid night. He confessed he saw three distinct individualities in her. He knows it. Does not wish to say so to Olcott for fear H. S, O. will make fun of him ! ! ! " The underscorings and points of exclamation are copied literally. The "W." mentioned was Mr. Wimbridge, who was then our guest. To account for an entry made ravij&ya as an old spurious work. I quote it now merely for the sake of the description of the dves'a process.  

by another person in my private Diary, I must explain that when I left New York on professional business, which I had to do several times in that year, the daily record was written up by " H. P. B.," the noun of multitude. In the entry of the following day (Oct. 13) the same hand, after specifying the seven visitors who called that evening, writes of one of them : " Dr. Pike, looking at H. P. B. several times, started and said that no one in the world impressed him so much. Once he sees in H. P. B. a girl of 16, at another an old woman of 100, and again a man with a beard ! ! " On Oct. 22, the Same hand writes : " H. P. B. left them [our visitors of that evening] in the dining-room and retired with H. S. O. to the library to write letters. N [a certain Mahatma] left watch and in came S [another adept] ; the latter with orders from .'. to complete all by the first day of December" [for our departure for India]. On November 9, in another modified H. P. B. script, is written : " Body sick and no hot-water to bathe it. Nice caboose." November 12, in the " M " script: " H. P. B. played a trick on me by suddenly fainting, to the great dismay of Bates and Wim. Used the greatest will-power to put up the body on its legs." November 14, in same handwriting : "N— : — decamped and M. walked in [from and into the H. P. B. body is meant]. Came with definite orders from .'. Have to go at the latest from 15 to 20 Dec. [to India]." November 29, another Mahatma writes that he had " answered the Russian Aunt " — i. e., the beloved aunt of H. P. B.  

Finally, not to dwell upon one subject too long, on Nov. 30, a third Mahatma writes : " Belle Mitchell came at 12 and took away the S [Mahatma M.] for a walk and drive. Went to Macy's. Had to materialise rupees. H. P. B. came home at 4, etc." I have also various letters from the Mahatmas alluding to H. P. B. in her own individual capacity, sometimes speaking very frankly about her peculiarities, good and bad, and was once sent, by the Masters, with written instructions, on a confidential mission to another city to bring about certain events necessary for her spiritual evolution. I have the document still. One quite long letter that I received in 1879, while in Rajputana, most strangely alters her sex, speaks of her in the male gender, and confounds her with Mahatma M.— known as our Guru. It says — about a first draft of the letter itself which had been written but not sent me : " Owing to certain expressions therein, the letter was stopped on its way by order of our Brother H. P. B. As you are not under my direct guidance but his (hers), we have naught to say, either of us ; etc.'' And again : " Our Brother H. P. B. rightly remarked at Jeypore that, etc." It is a noble communication throughout, and if it were pertinent to our present theme, I should feel tempted to publish it, so as to show the high quality of the correspondence that for years went on between my blessed Teachers and myself. It was in this particular letter that I was told, in answer to my expressed desire to retire from the world and go and live with them, that, " The only means available and at hand for you to reach us, is through the Theosophical Society" which I was abjured to consolidate, push for ward and build up ; I must learn to be unselfish. My correspondent adds : " None of us live for ourselves, we all live for humanity." This was the spirit of all my instructions, this is the idea inculcated throughout Isis Unveiled. Let the literary faults of that book be what they may ; let its author be charged with plagiarism or not ; the sum and substance of its argument is that man is of a complex nature, animal at one extreme, divine at the other ; and that the only real and perfect existence, the only one that is free from illusions, pain and sorrow, because in it, their cause — Ignorance — does not exist, is that of the spirit, the Highest Self. The book incites to pure and high living, to expansion of mind and universality of tenderness and sympathy ; it shows there is a Path upwards, and that it is accessible to the wise who are brave ; it traces all modern knowledge and speculation to archaic sources ; and, affirming the past and present existence of Adepts and of occult science, affords us a stimulus to work and an ideal to work up to. Upon its appearance the book made such a sensation that the first edition was exhausted within ten days.*

* 'D^iQ Americajt Bookseller (Oci.oh&v, 1877), says : "The sale , . . is unprecedented for a work of its kind, the entire edition having been exhausted within ten days of the date of publication. In 1783, Godfrey Higgins published \n5 Anacalypsis^ a work of similar charac ter, and although only 200 copies were printed, at the death of the author, a number of years after, many copies remained unsold, and were disposed of in bulk by his executors to a London bookseller. The work is now exceedingly rare and readily brings $100 per  

The critics, on the whole, dealt kindly with it. Dr. Shelton Mackenzie, one of the most capable ones of the day, writes that " it is one of the most remarkable works for originality of thought, thoroughness of research, depth of philosophic exposition, and variety and extent of learning that has appeared for very many years " (Phila. Press, October 9, 1887). The literary critic of the X. Y. Herald (Sep. 30, 1877), says that independent minds " will welcome the new publication as a most valuable contribution to philosophical literature," and that it " will supplement the Anacalypsis of Godfrey Higgins. There is a great resemblance between the works. . . . With its striking peculiarities, its auda city, its versatility and the prodigious \ ariety of subjects which it notices and handles, it is one of the remarkable productions of the century." Dr. G. Bloede, an erudite German scholar, says that, '' under all considerations, it will range among the most important contributions to the literature of the modern science of the spirit, and be worth the attention of every thinking student of this."

copy. The woild has grown older since the days of Higgins, and Madame Blavatsky's book is of greater interest ; but still the demand for it is quite remarkable, and far beyond the expectations of its pub lishers.'" Perfectly true ; and so surprised and pleased ^\as Mr. liouton, that on Sunday, Feb. lo, 1878, in my presence, he offered her $5,000 as copyriglit on an edition of a book in one volume, if she would write it, which should a little more unveil Isis. He in tended to print only 100 copies and make the price $100 per copy. Though she needed money badly enough, she refused the offer on the ground that she was not permitted at that time to divulge any more arcane secrets than she had done in Isis. Mr. Bouton is still living .lud can corroborate this statement.  

Some of the notices were flippant and prejudiced enough to make it clear that the critics had not read the book. For instance, the Springfield Republican said it was " a large dish of hash " ; The N. Y. Sun classifies it with the similar works of past times as " discarded rub bish " ; the Editor of the N. Y. Times wrote to Mr. Bouton that he was sorry they could not touch Isis Un veiled, as they " have a holy horror of Mme. Blavatsky and her letters " ; the N. Y. Tribune says her learning is " crude and undigested " and " her incoherent account of Brahmanism and Buddhism, suggests a hint of the presumption rather than the information of the writer." And so on and so forth. The weighty fact, however, is that the book has become a classic — as Mr. Quaritch prophesied to Mr. Bouton that it would ; * has gone through a number of editions ; and now, after the lapse of seventeen years, is in demand all over the world. When it was ready for publication I, of course, did what I could to bring it to the notice of my personal acquaint ance ; and I remember shortly afterwards meeting one of them — a leading legal functionary — in the street, and having him shake his fist at me in a friendly way, and say, " I have a crow to pick with you." " And why .? " I asked. " Why ? Because you made me buy Isis Un

* Mr. Quaritch writes to Mr. Bouton from London, December 27, 1877, in a letter which the latter kindly gave us as an encouraging forecast: "The book will evidently make its way in England and become a classic. I am very glad to be the English agent." And, I may add, we were more glad that he should be ; knowing his repu tation for indomitable energy and high-mindedness.  

veiled, and I found it so fascinating that my law cases are getting into arrears, and I have been sitting up nearly the whole of the past two nights to read it. Not only that, but she makes me feel what a lot of common place men we are in comparison with those Eastern mystics and philosophers she writes so charmingly about." The first money received for a copy of Isis was sent me by a lady of Styria with her order ; we kept it " for luck," and it now hangs, framed, on the walls of the Theosophist office at Adyar.

The truest thing ever said about Isis was the expres sion of an American author that it is " a book with a revolution in it."  

CHAPTER XVIII.

EARLY DAYS OF THE SOCIETY.

AMONG the public events which contributed to give notoriety to our Society in its early days, was the rescue of a party of pauper Arabs from threatened star vation, and their shipment to Tunis. It was theosophi cal only in the limited sense of being humanitarian, hence an act of altruism ; and all altruistic endeavours are essentially theosophical. Moreover, in this case, the element of religion was a factor. The story, in brief, is as follows :

One Sunday morning, in July, 1876, H. P. B. and I, being alone in the " Lamasery," read in the morning papers that a party of nine ship-wrecked Mussulman Arabs had been landed from the schooner Kate Foster, just arrived from Trinidad. They were penniless and friendless, could not speak a word of English, and had wandered about the streets for two days without food, until the secretary of the Turkish Consul gave them some loaves of bread, and, by order of His Honor the Mayor of New York, temporary shelter had been given   them at Bellevue Hospital. Unfortunately for them, certain New Regulations about emigrants had been adopted in the March preceding by the Commissioners of Public Charities and the Emigration Board, which made both those public bodies powerless to deal with cases like the present. The papers stated that the Arabs had brought no documents with them to prove their nationality, and thereby fix upon some foreign Consul the responsibility for their custody and relief ; in vain they had been taken to the consuls of Turkey and France ; and, unless private relief were forthcoming, a bitter prospect was before them. How well I remember the scene when we had read the narrative ! H. P. B. and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder, looking out of the south front window, each deploring the lot of the poor cast-aways. The fact which appealed strongest to our feelings was that they were Mussulmans — Heathen, whose religion placed them outside the bounds of ready sympathy in a community of Christians, who, to say nothing about popular prejudice, had too frequent ap peals to relieve the wants of their co-religionists. These unfortunates had a right, then, to the kind offices of fellow Heathen like ourselves, and then and there it was decided that I should go to work. The result was that I succeeded, under the favour of the Mayor of New York, in collecting some $2000, with which their neces sities were supplied, and they were sent to Tunis under charge of a member of our Society. All the details will be found in the Theosophist for September, 1893.  

As said in a previous chapter, among the most de lightful reminiscences of those early theosophic years is our correspondence with thoughtful, cultured persons of both sexes, of whom two are most lovingly remembered. They are Charles Carleton Massey and William Stainton Moseyn (or, as corrupted, Moses). The general topic of our correspondence was mentioned above (Cf. Chap ter IV.), and the names of these two loyal friends can never pass out of my memory. We, of course, repre sented the conservative party of Oriental Occultism ; Stainton Moseyn (Moses) was a progressive, truth-seek ing, highly-educated Spiritualist, taking him all-in-all the ablest man among them ; and Massey was between the two extremes, a candid and convinced investigator of the phenomena, with a deeply metaphysical mental bias, ready to meet half-way any new facts or ideas we might put forward. The interchange of letters — some so long as to be rather essays — continued between us four during several years, and our discussions covered a very wide range of interesting, important, even vital questions relating to psychological subjects. The one most thoroughly threshed out was, I fancy, that of the Elemental Spirits, their place in nature, and their rela tions with humanity. I had lightly touched upon this question in our first European manifesto above alluded to, but it was now gone into in all its chief bearings. I deeply regret that those in charge of Stainton Moseyn's papers, have not yet sent me those which might have helped me in my present work, as I might have made it   much more interesting by comparing H. P. B.'s and my letters with the replies of our friends, which I have pre served. S. M. had gone into the investigation of medi umistic phenomena with the sole purpose of satisfying himself whether they were real or not, but shortly found himself a medium despite himself, and the subject of phenomena of the most extraordinary kind. By night and by day, whether alone or in company, they would occur, and soon all the scientific and philosophical ideas he had brought away from Oxford, were scattered to the four winds, and he had to accept new theories of matter and force, man and nature. His revered friend and benefac tress, Mrs. Speer, gave in Light, weekly reports of the se ances held by S. M. at Dr. Speer's house, and, I venture to say, a more interesting record of mediumship has never been written, for, in past ages or the present, there has hardly ever been a more gifted medium than my heart brother, now dead and gone. His pre-eminence consisted in the surprising variety of his phenomena, which were both physical and psychical and all highly instructive, added to his trained mental endowments, which reflected themselves in the quality of the psychically transmitted intelligence, and his dogged determination to believe nothing taught him by the alleged spirits which he could not perfectly understand. The major part of these teachings he received by automatic writing through his own hand, just as Mr. Stead seems now to be getting his own spirit-teachings from Julia ; he might give his whole attention to reading a book or conversation, but   his disengaged hand would go on writing and writing by the half-hour together, and when he turned his eyes upon the pages thus covered, he would find original thoughts, conveying new ideas foreign to his own beliefs, or suc cessfully answering his questions previously put, per haps, on another occasion. He was always convinced, and vehemently so declared in his letters to us, that the intelligence controlling his hand was not his own ; neither his waking or latent consciousness, but just simply a spirit or spirits ; he claimed to know them perfectly by sight (clairvoyant), speech (clairaudient), and writing, as unmistakably as he knew any living person. We, on the other hand, urged that the question was not yet proven, and that there was at least an even chance that his " Im perator," or chief spirit-teacher, was his latent self, and that his circle phenomena were produced by Elementals coming for the time being under the dominion of his own masterful will. It appeared upon comparing notes that several of his most striking mediumistic phenomena were almost identical with those with which H. P. B. was edifying us in New York, and, since hers were ad mittedly produced by her subject Elementals, I could not see why his might not be also. Among these were the ringing of sweet " fairy bells " in the air ; the pro duction of delicious scents in the air and as exudations from the psychic's body, which, with H. P. B., bedewed the palms of her hands, and in S. M.'s case the scalp of his head ; lights floating through the air ; precipitations of writing on surfaces beyond the operator's reach ; ap ports of gems and other objects ; air-born music ; the possession by each of gems which changed colour and grew dull or black when the possessor fell ill ; the dis integration of crayons or leads to be used in precipitated writings ; identical Oriental perfumes perceived when certain invisible intelligences versed in occult science were present ; Oxon's perceiving in the astral light glow ing points of coloured light arranged in a triangle so as to form the mystic symbol of the Eastern Lodge of our Mahatmas ; and, finally, the power of leaving the physi cal body in the " double,'' retaining consciousness and resuming bodily occupancy at the end of the soul-flight.

So close a resemblance in experiences would naturally create a strong mutual interest between the two great psychics, and naturally enough S. M. was most eager to profit by any instructions or hints that H. P. B. could give him as to how he might improve his knowledge of the other world and gain that complete control over his psychical nature which the completed training for adept ship implies. What effect our interchange of views had upon S. M.'s mind and the teachings of " Imperator " to the Speer circle, will be considered in the next chapter. I shall also have something to say with respect to the view taken by educated Hindus as to the danger and puerility of psychical phenomena, whether produced by mediums or mdntrikas — possessors of charms of power.  

CHAPTER XIX.

CONFLICTING VIEWS.  

THE poles are scarcely farther apart than the views of Western Spiritualists and Asiatics with respect to communion with the dead. The former encourage it, often try to develop mediumship in themselves or their family members to enjoy it, support many journals and publish many books to tell about and dis cuss their phenomena, and cite the latter as proofs of the scientific basis of the doctrine of a future life. Asi atics, on the contrary, discourage these necromantic dab blings as soul-debaucheries, and affirm that they work incalculable evil both upon the dead and the living ; obstructing the normal evolution of man's spirit and delaying the acquirement of gnandm, the highest knowl edge. In Europe and America one often meets around the seance-table the noblest, purest, most learned, as well as their opposites ; in the East, the mediums and sorcerers are patronised only by Pariahs and other de graded castes, as a general rule. At the West, in these   latter days, families usually feel glad rather than sorry if a medium is discovered in their household, whereas in India it is thought a disgrace, a calamity, something to deplore and to abate as soon as possible.

The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Zoroastrian, the Mus sulman, are of one mind in the above respect, all being influenced by ancestral tradition as well as by their sacred writings. Dealings with the dead are not alone discountenanced, but also the exhibition of one's own psychical powers, whether congenital or developed later by ascetic training. The Indian Brahmin would, there fore, look with disfavour both upon the phenomena of M. A. Oxon, the medium, and those of H. P. B., the educated thaumaturgist. Not caring for the problems of Western psychology as intellectual stimuli, and hav ing forms of religion which start with the basic hypoth esis of spirit, they place but a minimum stress upon the psychic phenomena as proofs of immortality, loathe the obsessed medium as spiritually impure, and hold in diminished respect those who, possessing siddkis, vulgar ise them by display. The development of a long list of siddhis occurs naturally and spontaneously in the prog ress of Yogic training, of which only eight, Anima, Mahima, Laghima, etc., — the Ashta Siddhis, in short — relate to the higher spiritual state ; the other eighteen or more pertain to the astral plane and our relations to it and to the plane of this life. Black magicians and beginners have to do with these ; the progressed Adepts of White Magic with the nobler group. It is to be observed, then, that while H. P. B.'s phenomena com manded the adoring wonder of her Western pupils and other intimate friends, and caused the malignant scep ticism of her opponents, they actually lowered her in the opinion of the orthodox pundits and ascetics of India and Ceylon, as marking an inferior spiritual evolution.

With them, there was no question of the possible genu ineness of the marvels, for all such are recognised and catalogued in their Scriptures ; the mental aura of a Lankester would asphyxiate them. At the same time, while the display of psychical phenomena in public or before the vulgar is condemned, the knowledge that a religious teacher possesses them adds to his sancity, as being signs of his interior development ; but the rule is that they are not to be shown by a teacher even to his pupils before they have become so versed in spiritual philosophy as to be able to understand them.

In the KuUavagga, v., 8, I., is related tht story of the sandalwood bowl of the Setthi of R%agaha. He had had a bowl carved out of a block of sandalwood, and lifted it high up into the air on the top of a bamboo tied to a succession of other bamboos, and then offered it as a gift to any Sramafia or Brahman possessed of psychical powers (Iddhi) who could levitate himself and get it down. A renowned monk named Findala. Bhar advaga accepted the challenge, rose into the air and brought down the bowl, after going "thrice round Rdg'agaha in the air." The onlookers, a great con course, fell to shouting and doing him reverence, which   noise coming to the ears of the Buddha, he convened a private meeting of his diSciples and rebuked Piw^ala.  

" This is improper,'' said he. " Not according to rule, unsuitable, unworthy of a Sramana, unbecoming, and ought not to be done. . . . Just like a woman who displays herself for the sake of a miserable piece of money, have you, for the sake of a miserable wooden pot displayed before the laity the superhuman quality of your miraculous power of Iddhi. This will not con duce either to the conversion of the unconverted, or to the increase of the converted ; but rather to those who have not been converted remaining unconverted, and to the turning back of those who have been converted." He then made this imperative rule: "You are not,0 Bhikkus, to display before the laity the superhuman power of Iddhi." (Vide Sacred Books of the East, Vol. xx., p. 79.)

In Kullavagga, vii., 4, 7, Devadutta is said to have " come to a stop on his way (to Arahatship), because he had already attained to some lesser thing " (pothu_g-^an ika iddhi, or psychical powers) — and being satisfied thai he had reached the summit of development.

In Dr. Rijendraldla Mitra's note to Aphorism xxviii., of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, speaking about the devel oped psychical powers (siddhis), he says :

" The perfections described are of the world, worldly, required for worldly purposes, but useless for higher meditation, having isolation for its aim. Nor are they simply useless, but positively obstructive, for they inter fere with the even tenor of calm meditation."  

It is not widely understood that the developed psychi cal powers, covering the whole range of sublimated de grees of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, intuition (prophetic, retrospective, and contemporary), etc., bear to the awakened individuality a relation similar to that which the ordinary five senses do to the physical self, or personality. Just as one must learn to restrain one's perceptions of external things through the avenues of sense, to concentrate one's whole thought upon some deep problem of science or philosophy, so must the would-be gndnij or sage, control the activity of his de veloped clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc., if he would not have his object defeated by the wandering of his thought into the bypaths they open up. I have never seen this point clearly stated before, yet it is most im portant to bear in mind. Through ignorance of this rule Swedenborg, Davis, the Catholic Saints and re ligious visionaries of all other sects have, as it were, staggered, clairvoyantly drunk, through the picture galleries of the Astral Light ; seeing some things that were and creating others that were not until they begot them ; then giving out mangled prophecies, imagined revelations, bad counsel, false science, and misleading theology.

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